Persian Picnics
Published in Eland newsletter, July 2025
Published in Eland newsletter, July 2025
The Koran museum in the holy shrine of Mashad is tucked away in a distant corner of this vast, and ever-expanding pilgrimage complex. Perhaps not that many western tourists find it. We were certainly the only visitors that day and had spent such a long time admiring the exhibits and excitedly talking about them, that we were joined by a chador-clad curator, clearly delighted to find such enthusiastic customers. Bruce was in his element, chatting about how the colour codes used by calligraphers had been inherited from the craft traditions of Manichean scribes, and identifying the earliest examples of demotic commentaries (Chagatai, Sindi, Sistani and Dari) that swirled around the purposedly wide margins of the page, so that the dark ink of the central block of the Koran remained untouched. We listened to talk about the early love affair between Arabic script and paper, which as early as the 8thcentury was favoured for unlike parchment it could not be erased and corrected. Bruce also pointed a failure in a transcription that he had just spotted. More curators arrived but instead of looking cross and affronted, were delighted by the acute observation of this visiting scholar. So much so that we were whisked upstairs to have tea with the director in his turban and camelhair cloak, and then taken off to see a new gallery filled with the original watercolours of Ustad Mahmud. I was vaguely concerned that my request to take photographs might be considered disrespectful, but the smiles grew broader as we specified scenes that I was especially interested in, such as Ghadir Khumm where the Prophet Muhammad stands shoulder to shoulder with his young cousin, Imam Ali. Ustad lives in the USA but has gifted many of his original paintings to the shrine, a lifelong tribute of thanks for having his withered hand healed here as a boy. Ustad’s father had sold carpets in the souk at Isfahan.
It was our first morning in Iran.
Mashad was our base for the first couple of days, as we acclimatised and explored the north-east of Iran The distances were vast, and some of the journeys were clearly experimental, but to be seeing things in Iran that Bruce had never yet seen was a privilege in itself. Our second day took us towards the Afghan border but was broken by a two mile walk so that we could arrive at an isolated Seljuk caravanserai having understood something of the landscape. Our trip to discover the secret encampment of Nadir Shah (where his treasure had been was stored and where he was murdered by his own bodyguard) was accompanied by a thunderstorm that swept a river of mud, speckled with vast boulders across the road. Like all Bruce missions there was an inscription to be identified, which was up a narrow mountain gorge, carved into the living rock and which took us through a nomad encampment where he picked up a charming young guide. He was delighted to find that the inscription like Nadir Shah himself was vast and imposing, but essentially Turkic with Persian embellishments.
I had first met Bruce thirty years before. He was in disgrace (for spending too much time with Afghan musicians and not enough monitoring western aid workers) so I was already prejudiced in his favour. After two years as the Peshawar based Director of Afghan-Aid (1985-87) he had been summoned home to attend a conference where he would be deposed. He seemed unnaturally cheerful about his fate and scooped me off to have lunch with him in Soho. He was funny, fantastically indiscrete about the reality on the ground (Vodka sozzled Russians and Kiff sozzled Mujhadine engaged in furious shoot-outs while Pakistani intelligence, KHAD and Opium smugglers cut protection deals). He was already waging his personal jihad against canned music and on behalf of pepper grinders. I also noticed that, unlike all the other returning aid-workers, he did not need to advertise his travels with a Chitrali cap whilst in London but sported a broad brimmed brown hat.
Our last morning in Mashad was enlivened by a game of social chess. Bruce was determined not to be shown the documentary that is otherwise screened to all western visitors to the Imam’s shrine. So instead of quietly submitting to forty minutes of propaganda, we had a much longer series of interviews with clerics. This process culminated with a beardless Hazara from Afghanistan who smiled as he looked you in the eye and delivered a crushingly strong handshake whilst welcoming us with an American accent. Bruce had imaginatively embroidered, enhanced and exaggerated my importance as a commentator on Islam in Britain. I was thrilled by all this diplomacy. But of all my friends, I could at least be certain that Bruce had read my books, for he had copy edited by biography of the Prophet, followed by a collective portrait of the first Four Caliphs for any life-threatening historical inaccuracies. So we ended up in the company of an articulate young guide, who worked as an embryologist at Tehran but came to the shrine once a month to work as a volunteer. He did not profess to understand what happened here but had witnessed too many medical miracles to stay away. He was also plainly enchanted by the diversity of the pilgrims, and did nothing to keep us away from a mad old woman giving us sweets and blessings, or screen us from the sight of a breast-feeding young mother quietly reading the Koran, and happily introduced us to an Arab Catholic priest from Hama on a much needed break from the civil war in Syria. It proved to be a wonderful immersion into the lived world of Shiite Islam, from which I doubt I will ever fully recover.
Our tour had been based on a very short list of historical sites (the mountain-top fortress of the Assassins at Alamut, the foundation shrine of the Safavid dynasty at Ardabil, the Sassanian shrine of Takht ul-Suleyman and the shrine of the Imam at Mashad) but left all other details completely in Bruce’s hands.
We fully shared his delight in stage setting the perfect picnic lunch. This should be late enough in the day for you to be hungry, should be bathed in dappled shade with an uplifting view and should be sourced from local foods acquired during the days travel. Salad leaves, fresh white cheese, sliced and dressed vegetables, freshly baked bread (covered in small stones), olive oil and the water-melon were the principal notes. If nothing of interest could be acquired we went without, propped up by handfuls of dried fruit and nuts that Bruce had acquired in the markets. These had been decanted into a collection of small linen sacks which Bruce remained in complete control of, like an old fashioned housekeeper.
We decided not to talk “shop” during the picnic, for my wife and the three professional guides we were travelling with, had listened to more than enough about Safavids and Sassanids, Ilkhanids and Abbasids, Timurids and Qajars during the chatty Bruce-and-Barnaby history walks. I remember that our second picnic was dominated by stories about the other Bruce’s we had encountered: Bruce Anderson - the religious and Economist correspondent in Moscow, Bruce Palling - the wine-loving, south-east Asian journalist turned travel agent, Bruce Conde who ran the post office for the last Imam of Yemen before ending up an impoverished member of the Derkawi Sufi lodge in Tangier, and Bruce Chatwin - the art-dealer turned travel-writer.
The picnic held outside Qazvin, right beside a chuckling rill in a meadow surrounded by an orchard of ripening cherries and green walnuts overlooked by snow-clad mountains, decorated by a posie of wild-flowers gathered by Rose (that include borage and thyme) was our most perfect picnic pitch. While tea was brewed, we were served almonds and dried white mulberries with our slices of melon. I had already interviewed Reza our chess-playing tour manager from Shiraz (whose great grandfather had been killed by a lion when crossing the desert), Beni from Tehran (who looked like Durer’s depiction of Christ but showed a personal reverence for Pink Floyd with a daily change of T-shirts), Muhammad from Khuzestan (whose grandfathers estate of palm orchards had been totally devastated by the Iraqi invasion) and compiled a quiz for Reza’s ten year old son (our honorary fourth guide) about our shared interest in Tintin.
Now it was Bruce’s turn and so I interviewed him about the years before I had first met him. His time at Oriel had also allowed for an extra year in Paris. So after the four year-long lotus eating life of an Oxford student of modern languages was finnished, Bruce spent two years in Italy (1975-1977) where a typical ‘working” week was subdivided between Madrigals, two days of tutoring and researching the History of the Great Rebellion and doing something for “Voice of Daily America”. This was followed by a year in Berlin, labelled by Bruce “Max Plank Educational Research” though his memories of this period were overwhelmed by his elder sister’s suicide. Bruce remembered that she left behind two letters and for the first time he “watched the carapace of strength drain from the face of my father.” Artemis Cooper then provided Bruce with a useful introduction to Paul Gosht who invited him to teach English in Isfahan through the British Council. This happy task would last for two years (autumn of 1978 to the summer of 1980) and seems to have been on an ad hoc basis. Every third month, Bruce would cross a Persian frontier, and travel into Afghanistan, Pakistan or India for a bit, then return to the Iranian frontier and collect a fresh three month tourist visa.
In retrospect it was this period of his life, that turned Bruce from a linguist to an Orientalist. For it was Isfahan that he taught himself Persian and learned to travel cheaply and with such confidence. It also coincided with the bloody events of the Iranian revolution and the death of a close friend, and a nightmare succession of events as Bruce assisted the family of his friend in collecting his body and burying their son, amidst road blocks manned by Revolutionary Guards infected by the general anti-western paranoia of the times. In the hands of a more callous individual, or a more ambitious writer, it would have made the perfect dark narrative of real experiences in which to set your first travel book. But in other conversations, at other times, I felt that these two experiences (the death of his sister, followed by the death of this friend in Isfahan) were veiled, the tragic gateway which he crossed to become a man. I sometimes wonder what would have happened, if the Civil Service exam which Bruce sat on his return from Isfahan, had sent him off to the Foreign Office or the British Council, instead of deciding that he could best serve his country in the Inland Revenue. The rest of his life I thought I knew enough about. So I put my notebook down and accepted another cup of tea before the post-picnic siesta.
My wife had taken some tapestry with her on this journey across Iran. She also found some bolts of Persian silk in a market which she was using to complete a design of shells for a pair of slippers for her youngest daughter. She has an equable temperament and a gentle way of observing people with interest but without judgement. She made very few demands but joined in on everything. So I am afraid she became the favourite person in this vehicle of six men. When she expressed a passing interest in a thin blue hairbell like wild tulip seen from out of a window, our vehicle was immediately halted by our driver and rapidly driven in reverse, with all eyes concentrated on helping her locate this flower.
We were soon all strolling around in the meadow of a pretty highland valley. An entrenching tool was located from a compartment in the boot and excavations were begun so that she could possess both flower and bulb. Just at this moment, a farmer came roaring down the hill, in a military looking camouflage jacket and a thick black beard. If this was England, we would have been in for a voluble roasting, for we were now sprawled over someone’s land, drinking tea and stealing their wild-flowers from out of their meadow. But it was Iran and we were with Bruce. The fierce looking farmer welcomed us hospitably to his land, enthusiastically shook hands with everyone, politely refused our tea but took us off on a walk through his meadow, plucking edible meadow flowers and salad weeds for our next picnic. Bruce’s eyes brimmed over with delight, and so we carried on down to the river bed, where hidden by high reeds an old labourer was clearing an irrigation ditch with a mattock. He revealed himself to be the 75 year old landlord of this valley, who joined in the chatter about medicinal flowers, recommending that you harvest hollyhock flowers in early summer to make a tea which is especially good at coping with sore throats. He also invited us to take tea with him in the summer in a beautiful little balcony that had been built over a lone tool shed which stood in a distant field to catch the cool of the evening breeze – but with an eloquent hand gesture revealed that for the moment, there was work at hand that needed his attention. We were enchanted at the idea of returning to not an ornamental, but a useful pavilion, whose season for use was at a time of rest, after the harvest was in. On our walk back, I heard Bruce extract the entire family history from Hassan the bearded farmer. He had a brother who taught metallurgy at the local university, but our friend Hassan turned his back on his own academic career (nautical navigation) to help his old father on the land. They had bee hives but did not put down sugar, preferring to extract a small yield of exquisite honey which was shared out amongst their cousins. If there is an Arcadia, we had at last found it. And to prove it a couple of miles later, Bruce stopped our vehicle, so that I could walk alone over the summit of a hill and discover for myself the view of the sacred crater lake of Takht ul -Suleyman, enclosed in a circuit of ancient fortress walls. As I descended a vast herd of goats, escorted by two shepherds (with their panniers carried by a little mule train) filled the foreground with animation and the twinkling of bells.
Northern Iran, March 2016